Reviews for A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade

The average rating for A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-16 00:00:00 Raeven Harris Christopher Benfey takes a promising premise--the differing relations of many prominent 19th century authors and artists (Emily Dickinson, Austin Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Martin Johnson Heade, and several others) who are united (he argues) over their loves of the hummingbird. While many of these individuals did have relationships with the others (though none with all), he provides little other than a few references by most of the characters to birds to unite their stories. The historical analysis was very weak, and while many of his conjectures are not refutable, he provides precious little to defend them. Much of Benfey's argument relies on contentious evidence he extracts from generous extrapolations from his texts; for a scholar of Emily Dickinson, he demonstrated weak readings, I thought, of the poet; identifying several of her poems as on hummingbird themes, when it's not always necessarily apparent the subject is even a bird. His argument about the hummingbird as an image of changing social thought in Post-Bellum America is poorly developed, and the narrative itself suffers from an unbalanced attention to all of his characters. Mark Twain and Henry Ward Beecher only crop up when they seem relevant, and then never return, with no explanation. Benfey seems to brush over many of his characters as uninteresting, without giving them sufficient time and space to sustain his judgments (Eunice Beecher is dismissed as a "rather stiff little trophy," with no defense--and no footnote). Benfey's historical research is shoddy, and relies on only a few secondary texts to support his arguments outside of his literary works; a broader palate of both secondary and primary texts would have permitted a better development narrative and argument. Finally, the epilogue seems entirely to lose sight of the rest of the book's narrative and argument, and delves into a history of criticism of Emily Dickinson, leaving the reader wondering just what happened to the nineteenth century story-line. Still, the book somehow manages to be an enjoyable, if maddening, read.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-01-06 00:00:00 Nicola Freidanck When I finished this book the word delicate came to mind, suited to a work in which hummingbirds play so big a part. It's a pleasure to read criticism as delicate as this and as magical as a hummingbird's flight. Benfey describes an age of American art and letters and society and history focusing on the lives and work of Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Johnson Heade, and Emily Dickinson as well as various lives around them. He finds what they all have in common and shows how those enthusiasms link them and help create the art we associate with the period following the Civil War. Benfey uses the theme of hummingbirds, appropriate to all his subjects, to flit from person to person connecting them in the darting thrust of his text and ideas. But not only hummingbirds stitch them together--they share other confluences of circumstance, such as Brazil, transits of Venus, northeastern Florida, and flowers like the trailing arbutus. The picture Benfey is able to give us of the period and his subjects by using all these associations is colorful and elaborate. If the book has a main focus it's Dickinson. She's the flower here and the others along with their family and acquaintances are the hummingbirds who hover and feed on or near her presence in our literary history. I think the book is ambitious, clever criticism.